The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590171918 ISBN 13: 9781590171912

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2006

Synopsis

A New York Review Books Original

A master anthology of Russia’s most important poetry, newly collected and never before published in English

In the years before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Stray Dog cabaret in St. Petersburg was the haunt of poets, artists, and musicians, a place to meet, drink, read, brawl, celebrate, and stage performances of all kinds. It has since become a symbol of the extraordinary literary ferment of that time. It was then that Alexander Blok composed his apocalyptic sequence “Twelve”; that the futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky exploded language into bold new forms; that the lapidary lyrics of Osip Mandelstam and plangent love poems of Anna Akhmatova saw the light; that the electrifying Marina Tsvetaeva stunned and dazzled everyone. Boris Pasternak was also of this company, putting together his great youthful hymn to nature, My Sister, Life.

It was a transforming moment—not just for Russian but for world poetry—and a short-lived one. Within little more than a decade, revolution and terror were to disperse, silence, and destroy almost all the poets of the Stray Dog cabaret.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Schmidt wrote many award winning translations. He held a Ph.D in Slavic Literature from Harvard and was a professor of Russian literature at the University of Texas and Wellesley College. His critical essays appeared in The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and Delos. He was a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Catherine Ciepiela is Professor of Russian at Amherst, and author of The Same Solitude, a book about Marinas Tsvetaeva's long-distance romance with Boris Pasterna.

Honor Moore's collections of poems are RedShoes, Darling, and Memoir. She edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems for the Library of America and is author of The White Blackbird, a life of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent.

Reviews

A professor of Russian whose translations included the plays of Anton Chekhov and the avant-garde writings of Velimir Khlebnikov, Schmidt (1934-1999) also worked with the director and composer Elizabeth Swados on what would have been groundbreaking musical settings for famous lyric poems and sequences from the great era of Russian modernism, set in the café-the Stray Dog-where modernists gathered. The theatrical work never appeared, but those drafts became this book, a memorial to the time-beginning around 1906, and concluding after Stalin's rise to power-when Alexander Blok and Anna Akhmatova created pellucid elegiac stanzas, Osip Mandelstam meditated on existential dilemmas, Vladimir Mayakosky exploded into radical free verse, and Khlebnikov obliterated the line between prophecy and nonsense. Apparently the first original publication from the New York Review imprint (exclusively a reprint house until now), this collection makes an ideally readable introduction to this sometimes forbidding, internationally admired, poetic group. Fin-de-siecle concerns of love in cafés, of "sun and song," flirtation and regret, give way to darker worries as the Russian Revolution runs its course: Blok and Boris Pasternak sound particularly effective in Schmidt's libretto-like, clarified versions, while Akhmatova-grown older, immersed in sorrow-proposes a toast "to the terrible world we inhabit/ And to God, who never replied." Editor Catherine Ciepela offers a long and useful introduction, along with capsule biographies of Schmidt's eight poets; poet and biographer Honor Moore adds an epilogue not seen by PW.
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On New Year's Day, 1912, a cabaret with the cock a snook name Stray Dog opened in St. Petersburg, Russia, and became the place where the avant-garde met, debated, performed, and otherwise presented itself to itself. Habitues included the greatest concentration of major poets in Russian history, all born between 1880 and 1895: Blok, Akhmatova, Esenin, Khlebnikov, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak. The late Paul Schmidt was a man of the theater, and his translations of the Stray Dog group are crafted for declamation. He gives the two long poems, Blok's "The Twelve" and Tsvetaeva's "Poem of the End," so much impetus and color (they are among their authors' masterpieces) that one hears them without reading aloud and sometimes can't help speaking them to appreciate them better. The selection extends long after the Stray Dog's closing, to Esenin's and Mayakovsky's suicide poems and Mandelstam's ferocious "Poem about Stalin." Only Akhmatova and Pasternak lived beyond 1941, writing far more somberly than in their youth. This book conjures their group's initial passion, humor, and revolutionary zeal. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1590171918
• ISBN 13: 9781590171912
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168